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Somehow it seems strange that Japan, the motherland of robots, fails to build a robot. Money can't be the reason. There has been an investment surge into radio

Somehow it seems strange that Japan, the motherland of robots, fails to build a robot. Money can't be the reason. There has been an investment surge into radioactive cleanup technology starting with the damaged reactors six years ago. Six years and billions of dollars later we get a robot that gets stuck and fails after just two hours. From what I've gathered they didn't even include a proper radiation sensor but used the camera noise in order to "guesstimate" the dosage after the fact. Did they not expect high radiation in that location?

Pica_soO 10y ago
Electronics of the shelve get very unreliable in high dosage environments. The radiation rewrites your loaded programs, by flipping bits and causing rising edges where there shouldn't be some. So the program running on your camera will dissolve above some radiation levels, locking it in a watchdog detects and reboot cycle. There are approaches to circumvent that in low to medium environment- one is to have redundant systems and select the "majority" vote on computation results. But at this level, the only solution is to not have computation near the source and put up with long cable/fibre cable delay- which is tough with complex sensors (aka computers) like cameras. It is probably some snail-eye setup- the camera a remote mini-drone on cable, retracted on black out.
- static_noise 10y ago
  Does that mean you cannot use robots, nor can you use humans, to clean up this mess? What do you do then?
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    It means, that the robots have to be very "custom" build ones. With the intelligent parts beeing deposited outside of the dangerous area, communicating with the muscle via e.g. fibreoptics. The robot consists ideally of some die-hard sensors positioned as far away as possible and as close as necessary - which are retractable mechanically in case of software failure by left behind elements. Then there is the actual tooling, which is basically just a remote controlled shell. A complicated setup, to say the least. Imagine a Anemone with some little remote camera fishes on a tentacle, controlling a robotic crab on the longest tentacle of them all.
    - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      > the intelligent parts beeing [sic] deposited outside of the dangerous area Is there a material that is transparent at optical frequencies but opaque at higher energies?
      - baq 10y ago
        Glass, but nothing stops neutrons.
        rdtsc 10y ago
        You can stop them by slowing them down. Usually you'd use ellastic collisions with light atoms like hydrogen. Water works which is what reactors use. For shipping polyethylene is often used. Then some materials simply have a higher cross section for absorbing the slow ones. Had to look this up I saw boron and cadmium. (Married to person who used to ship Californium-252)
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Ideally you'd want it to be gamma-transparent as well; otherwise, those gamma photons which hit it are going to deposit their energy into it. This is how glass viewing windows in nuclear materials processing facilities, for example, gradually cloud and embrittle over time, and have to be replaced. I'm not sure how well a relatively thin optical fiber would stand up, especially under the kind of bombardment we're talking about here.
  - varjag 10y ago
    You can use humans to clean the mess, whose massively redundant computational model is much more robust to radiation damage. They will however suffer or die from radiation exposure long term. This is what was done at Chernobyl in admittedly much more dire situation. A quantity of Japanese remote-controlled robots were urgently imported back then as well, and failed in the same manner.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      > You can use humans to clean the mess Not this mess, or even that one, really. The "bio-robots", so called by their masters, were mainly collecting debris from the reactor explosion for containment; they were not trying to deal with the core slag sunk into the basement of the building, which at that time was still thermally very hot as well as being ferociously active. Even to approach that would have been immediately lethal. Given the cited dose rate, the same is true at Fukushima - an acute dose of 10Sv is very likely lethal on its own, and at 650Sv/h you get more than that every minute. Anyone you send into that is going to be unable to work within seconds, and dead inside a couple of minutes tops.
      - varjag 10y ago
        The 'Elephant Foot' is 93Sv/h, and there is numerous footage of it filmed by human operators during containment efforts.
        throwanem 10y ago
        That's good to know, thanks. On the other hand, I find sources calling that dose rate lethal within minutes, and at least some of the Fukushima corium is roughly seven times as active. Even if you're willing to write off as many lives as it takes to reduce what is essentially solidified lava by means of hand tools into a containable form, I doubt it's likely to succeed simply because it'll kill off your workers so fast that, after a little while, no further progress is possible because of all the corpses blocking the way.
        10y ago
  - alphonsegaston 10y ago
    Realize that the ostensible safety of nuclear energy is based on believing that black swan environmental and political events are impossible. Walk away from it and move heavily/quickly toward renewables.
- cnvogel 10y ago
  In my day-job, I (help) design electronics that is subjected to (much less) radiation, and we also irradiate our devices to check for long-term effects (and this is done with a comparable doserate in a facility for this purpose). Damage to your electronics in practice is almost exclusively caused by Photons (convention is to call this γ-Radiation when caused by radioactive decay in the nucleus, X-Rays when created in an accelerator). β-radiation (fast electrons) is easily shielded by thin layers of metal, and α (He nuclei) can't penetrate sheets of paper. Individual photons can't really deposit much energy at a single location in your semiconductor, so they aren't able to generate enough charge to "flip bits" instantly. Flash still uses a lot of charge/bit, so it's relatively stable, DRAM is constantly refreshed and SRAM would need a jolt of high current to flip, so that does not really happen, either. What radiation does, however, is to slowly damage the Silicon and change its crystal structure (introducing defects) which increases leakage and moves the analog threshold voltages of circuits around in a funny way. So, what we often see is flash becoming un-programmable on a more global scale (rather than individual stuck bits), and most importantly the analog aspects (voltage references, brownout-protection circuits, voltage regulators) cease to function. This is all very variable, but we normally observe effects starting at "a few 100 Gy" when testing more complicated modules. We don't research individual components, though. One especially nasty type or radiation are neutrons, though. When being "moderated" (slowly decelerated by successive interactions with material) they tend to have a high likelihood of merging with some other nucleus (being captured), and the energy resulting from this capture effect can be huge and concentrated on a single spot. This can be enough to flip bits, and this indeed may be an issue near the funny isotope mixture present in Fokushima at various places. Having a strong neutron emitter is very uncommon, though. Unfortunately these damages are not specific to digital electronics, and especially optical components (parent refers to long fibre cables) tend to be rather sensitive due to their large structures, so "keeping the computers out" may not help much overall.
  - Retric 10y ago
    In this case there is zero need for electronics on the robot. You can have a pure mechanical system with a fiber optic camera etc like a endoscope. Power as torc through a plumbers snake. It can then either carry a box with some sensor package, or take remote samples. For extreme radiation, you can put a Film badge dosimeter in a water tub to work out the radiation levels indirectly.
frik 10y ago
Exactly. They could use a simple glass fiber cable. The technique is used in endoscopes, all the need is a 20m endoscope. How hard can it be to order or manufacture one. The camera then would sit outside on the other end. Japan seems really not capable of handling the desaster at all. The shit is still leaking into the pacific ocean. It'ms mind blowing that US isn't helping ...as it's effects Hawaii and the west coast. And if they don't fix it, it will effect all connected oceans. The Russians at least did a lot to fix the most major issues after Chernobyl. The sent in half a million of their own people as liquidators to clean up and cover it with lot of concrete and steel. And especially dug a tunnel below to make sure the shit doesn't eat itself down to the bedrock. And what does Japan? Nothing to speak of. Where are the Japanese people who fix the shit with their hand? They don't even know if the shit eats to the bedrock, nor in how many of their busted reactors on that site it is happening. They have to get over their cultural attitudes of "I could loose my face" and bribery. They need to fire all TEPCO staff and do it as a state owned disaster recovery operation with their army and with international help. Can a country please take over this region and declare it as international desaster zone so tht other countries can start helping.
- tptacek 10y ago
  There are 187000000000000 million gallons of water in the Pacific Ocean. The plant "leaks" (they're intentional) are not affecting Hawaii; they're not even affecting Japan's coast.
  - frik 10y ago
    "In April 2014, studies confirmed the presence of radioactive tuna off the coasts of the pacific U.S.[228] Researchers carried out tests on 26 albacore tuna caught prior to the 2011 power plant disaster and those caught after. However, the amount of radioactivity is less than that found naturally in a single banana.[229][230] As of June 2016, dispersed nuclear fallout and associated radiation contamination continue to pollute the environment. Tilman Ruff, a professor at the University of Melbourne, stated that every day 300 tons of contaminated water leak from the crippled nuclear plant.[231] The Reconstruction Agency states that 174,000 people have been unable to return to their homes. Ecological diversity has decreased and malformations have been found in trees, birds, and mammals.[231]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
throwanem 10y ago
Radiation-hardening electronics is not simple, and this robot was rated for 1000Sv cumulative, which is something of an accomplishment even if it wasn't enough for the environment here. The article also absurdly understates what an activity level like 650Sv/h actually means. It "could kill a person quickly", the article says, as though the question were open - the truth of the matter is that such heavy irradiation will kill an unprotected human in a matter of seconds, a few minutes at most. As for protected humans, good luck wearing thick enough and dense enough armor to make a meaningful difference under that kind of bombardment - and if you do manage to find it and wear it, good luck not suffocating or being crushed outright under its weight. This should, I hope, put in some more accurate perspective the fact that the robot lasted a couple of hours. It doesn't sound like much, and isn't - but it's vastly better than anything else we've got. It should also, I hope, put paid to a sibling commenter's rather hideous suggestion of using Chernobyl-style "bio-robot" "liquidators" to deal with the aftermath. The only way that might possibly work would be by insulating the active slag under a thick layer of quite dead and half-cooked human bodies - a very Soviet suggestion, perhaps, but nothing to be seriously suggested by anyone who values even the pretense of civilized humanity.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > Chernobyl-style "bio-robot" "liquidators" Anybody that isn't familiar with the "liquidators" should watch Chernobyl 3828, a Ukrainian documentary about the cleanup of the worst part of the roof with comments by the people currently working their two-minute shifts as a "bio-robot". http://www.telecon.kiev.ua/eng/projects/chernobyl_3828.html http://www.telecon.kiev.ua/eng/projects/chernobyl_3828.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk

Pica_soO 10y ago

Electronics of the shelve get very unreliable in high dosage environments. The radiation rewrites your loaded programs, by flipping bits and causing rising edges where there shouldn't be some. So the program running on your camera will dissolve above some radiation levels, locking it in a watchdog detects and reboot cycle. There are approaches to circumvent that in low to medium environment- one is to have redundant systems and select the "majority" vote on computation results. But at this level, the only solution is to not have computation near the source and put up with long cable/fibre cable delay- which is tough with complex sensors (aka computers) like cameras. It is probably some snail-eye setup- the camera a remote mini-drone on cable, retracted on black out.

static_noise 10y ago
Does that mean you cannot use robots, nor can you use humans, to clean up this mess? What do you do then?
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  It means, that the robots have to be very "custom" build ones. With the intelligent parts beeing deposited outside of the dangerous area, communicating with the muscle via e.g. fibreoptics. The robot consists ideally of some die-hard sensors positioned as far away as possible and as close as necessary - which are retractable mechanically in case of software failure by left behind elements. Then there is the actual tooling, which is basically just a remote controlled shell. A complicated setup, to say the least. Imagine a Anemone with some little remote camera fishes on a tentacle, controlling a robotic crab on the longest tentacle of them all.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    > the intelligent parts beeing [sic] deposited outside of the dangerous area Is there a material that is transparent at optical frequencies but opaque at higher energies?
    - baq 10y ago
      Glass, but nothing stops neutrons.
      - rdtsc 10y ago
        You can stop them by slowing them down. Usually you'd use ellastic collisions with light atoms like hydrogen. Water works which is what reactors use. For shipping polyethylene is often used. Then some materials simply have a higher cross section for absorbing the slow ones. Had to look this up I saw boron and cadmium. (Married to person who used to ship Californium-252)
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Ideally you'd want it to be gamma-transparent as well; otherwise, those gamma photons which hit it are going to deposit their energy into it. This is how glass viewing windows in nuclear materials processing facilities, for example, gradually cloud and embrittle over time, and have to be replaced. I'm not sure how well a relatively thin optical fiber would stand up, especially under the kind of bombardment we're talking about here.
- varjag 10y ago
  You can use humans to clean the mess, whose massively redundant computational model is much more robust to radiation damage. They will however suffer or die from radiation exposure long term. This is what was done at Chernobyl in admittedly much more dire situation. A quantity of Japanese remote-controlled robots were urgently imported back then as well, and failed in the same manner.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > You can use humans to clean the mess Not this mess, or even that one, really. The "bio-robots", so called by their masters, were mainly collecting debris from the reactor explosion for containment; they were not trying to deal with the core slag sunk into the basement of the building, which at that time was still thermally very hot as well as being ferociously active. Even to approach that would have been immediately lethal. Given the cited dose rate, the same is true at Fukushima - an acute dose of 10Sv is very likely lethal on its own, and at 650Sv/h you get more than that every minute. Anyone you send into that is going to be unable to work within seconds, and dead inside a couple of minutes tops.
    - varjag 10y ago
      The 'Elephant Foot' is 93Sv/h, and there is numerous footage of it filmed by human operators during containment efforts.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        That's good to know, thanks. On the other hand, I find sources calling that dose rate lethal within minutes, and at least some of the Fukushima corium is roughly seven times as active. Even if you're willing to write off as many lives as it takes to reduce what is essentially solidified lava by means of hand tools into a containable form, I doubt it's likely to succeed simply because it'll kill off your workers so fast that, after a little while, no further progress is possible because of all the corpses blocking the way.
        10y ago
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Realize that the ostensible safety of nuclear energy is based on believing that black swan environmental and political events are impossible. Walk away from it and move heavily/quickly toward renewables.
cnvogel 10y ago
In my day-job, I (help) design electronics that is subjected to (much less) radiation, and we also irradiate our devices to check for long-term effects (and this is done with a comparable doserate in a facility for this purpose). Damage to your electronics in practice is almost exclusively caused by Photons (convention is to call this γ-Radiation when caused by radioactive decay in the nucleus, X-Rays when created in an accelerator). β-radiation (fast electrons) is easily shielded by thin layers of metal, and α (He nuclei) can't penetrate sheets of paper. Individual photons can't really deposit much energy at a single location in your semiconductor, so they aren't able to generate enough charge to "flip bits" instantly. Flash still uses a lot of charge/bit, so it's relatively stable, DRAM is constantly refreshed and SRAM would need a jolt of high current to flip, so that does not really happen, either. What radiation does, however, is to slowly damage the Silicon and change its crystal structure (introducing defects) which increases leakage and moves the analog threshold voltages of circuits around in a funny way. So, what we often see is flash becoming un-programmable on a more global scale (rather than individual stuck bits), and most importantly the analog aspects (voltage references, brownout-protection circuits, voltage regulators) cease to function. This is all very variable, but we normally observe effects starting at "a few 100 Gy" when testing more complicated modules. We don't research individual components, though. One especially nasty type or radiation are neutrons, though. When being "moderated" (slowly decelerated by successive interactions with material) they tend to have a high likelihood of merging with some other nucleus (being captured), and the energy resulting from this capture effect can be huge and concentrated on a single spot. This can be enough to flip bits, and this indeed may be an issue near the funny isotope mixture present in Fokushima at various places. Having a strong neutron emitter is very uncommon, though. Unfortunately these damages are not specific to digital electronics, and especially optical components (parent refers to long fibre cables) tend to be rather sensitive due to their large structures, so "keeping the computers out" may not help much overall.
- Retric 10y ago
  In this case there is zero need for electronics on the robot. You can have a pure mechanical system with a fiber optic camera etc like a endoscope. Power as torc through a plumbers snake. It can then either carry a box with some sensor package, or take remote samples. For extreme radiation, you can put a Film badge dosimeter in a water tub to work out the radiation levels indirectly.

frik 10y ago

Exactly. They could use a simple glass fiber cable. The technique is used in endoscopes, all the need is a 20m endoscope. How hard can it be to order or manufacture one. The camera then would sit outside on the other end. Japan seems really not capable of handling the desaster at all. The shit is still leaking into the pacific ocean. It'ms mind blowing that US isn't helping ...as it's effects Hawaii and the west coast. And if they don't fix it, it will effect all connected oceans. The Russians at least did a lot to fix the most major issues after Chernobyl. The sent in half a million of their own people as liquidators to clean up and cover it with lot of concrete and steel. And especially dug a tunnel below to make sure the shit doesn't eat itself down to the bedrock. And what does Japan? Nothing to speak of. Where are the Japanese people who fix the shit with their hand? They don't even know if the shit eats to the bedrock, nor in how many of their busted reactors on that site it is happening. They have to get over their cultural attitudes of "I could loose my face" and bribery. They need to fire all TEPCO staff and do it as a state owned disaster recovery operation with their army and with international help. Can a country please take over this region and declare it as international desaster zone so tht other countries can start helping.

tptacek 10y ago
There are 187000000000000 million gallons of water in the Pacific Ocean. The plant "leaks" (they're intentional) are not affecting Hawaii; they're not even affecting Japan's coast.
- frik 10y ago
  "In April 2014, studies confirmed the presence of radioactive tuna off the coasts of the pacific U.S.[228] Researchers carried out tests on 26 albacore tuna caught prior to the 2011 power plant disaster and those caught after. However, the amount of radioactivity is less than that found naturally in a single banana.[229][230] As of June 2016, dispersed nuclear fallout and associated radiation contamination continue to pollute the environment. Tilman Ruff, a professor at the University of Melbourne, stated that every day 300 tons of contaminated water leak from the crippled nuclear plant.[231] The Reconstruction Agency states that 174,000 people have been unable to return to their homes. Ecological diversity has decreased and malformations have been found in trees, birds, and mammals.[231]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

throwanem 10y ago

Radiation-hardening electronics is not simple, and this robot was rated for 1000Sv cumulative, which is something of an accomplishment even if it wasn't enough for the environment here. The article also absurdly understates what an activity level like 650Sv/h actually means. It "could kill a person quickly", the article says, as though the question were open - the truth of the matter is that such heavy irradiation will kill an unprotected human in a matter of seconds, a few minutes at most. As for protected humans, good luck wearing thick enough and dense enough armor to make a meaningful difference under that kind of bombardment - and if you do manage to find it and wear it, good luck not suffocating or being crushed outright under its weight. This should, I hope, put in some more accurate perspective the fact that the robot lasted a couple of hours. It doesn't sound like much, and isn't - but it's vastly better than anything else we've got. It should also, I hope, put paid to a sibling commenter's rather hideous suggestion of using Chernobyl-style "bio-robot" "liquidators" to deal with the aftermath. The only way that might possibly work would be by insulating the active slag under a thick layer of quite dead and half-cooked human bodies - a very Soviet suggestion, perhaps, but nothing to be seriously suggested by anyone who values even the pretense of civilized humanity.

pdkl95 10y ago
> Chernobyl-style "bio-robot" "liquidators" Anybody that isn't familiar with the "liquidators" should watch Chernobyl 3828, a Ukrainian documentary about the cleanup of the worst part of the roof with comments by the people currently working their two-minute shifts as a "bio-robot". http://www.telecon.kiev.ua/eng/projects/chernobyl_3828.html http://www.telecon.kiev.ua/eng/projects/chernobyl_3828.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk